Is Your Press Release Adding Value to the Media Outlet That Publishes it?
A large number of people across different industries and business segments are under the impression that media outlets are just waiting to publish their press releases. Ask any editor you know personally, and s/he will tell you that it is not true. There are several factors that eventually add up to the editor selecting your press release for publication.
These are – relevance of your story with the niche of the publication or website, how well it fits in with the priorities of the publication in a specific edition, and is the story written well enough? When you submit a press release, you need to consider all these likely barriers that the newswire agency will face.
Your story should be relevant to the publication
If your press release speaks about an innovation in industrial equipment and it ends up at the mailbox of an editor of a women’s fashion magazine, it will end up in trash. That’s why you need to make sure that your story is distributed by the best press release submission service. Not all the newswire agencies that you come across are reliable and there are many that merely exist to make quick and easy money. It is easy to get distracted by claims of reaching thousands of media outlets across continents. Hence, you need to focus on your priorities.
Media outlets have their own priorities too
One of the major challenges that the chief editor of a journal faces is the theme, cover story and feature story of his next edition. If the editor of a journal covering healthy diet has set up his forthcoming edition to focus on organically produced fruits and vegetables, do not submit a press release about the launch of a new car wash outlet to this publication. These barriers act as preliminary filters in the journey of your press release to multitudes of media outlets. Only, you do not know about it because you believed that it is going to ‘thousands’ of media outlets.
A press release should appeal to the editor
Editors are some of the busiest people in a media outlet and they have to deal with several issues from the stories to the pagination that is to go into the next edition and a lot more. Every day, the editor receives newsfeed from different sources including many press releases from newswire agencies. It requires long hours on the newsroom workstation to read all the newsfeed and select what can be used. Unless the story is from the best press release submission service known to the editor, s/he may not even open it, and even after s/he opens a press release, it could still end up in trash if it is poorly written.
A reputable newswire agency knows most of the editors in the media outlets where they send their press releases. This is not the same as doing a search on the web for ‘free newswire services’ and then sending your press release to as many as you can find, hoping to reach editors across continents. It does not happen that easily because of the simple reason that journalists are also very sensitive individuals and do not entertain people unless they know them well enough. It takes a newswire agency, months to build up relations with the editors just to ensure that the press releases they send, get published.